Nisei Fought Secret War of Words : World War II: Linguists drawn from America’s internment camps in the ‘40s served in every major battle in the Pacific. They culled critical information from Japanese captives and the airwaves.

Half a century ago, the Japanese commanders didn’t bother putting many of their wartime military communications into code. After all, they knew how strange their language looked and sounded to foreign eyes and ears.

But the Imperial Army didn’t know about an American secret weapon during World War II, the Military Intelligence Service, 6,000 Japanese-American linguists who served in every major battle in the Pacific, from the Aleutians to Okinawa.

They questioned captives for immediate, useful information. They eavesdropped on communications between Japanese pilots and their airfields.

They read poems and diaries taken from the bodies of dead soldiers.

If the Japanese warriors didn’t know about the Japanese-American translators, neither did the American public. The government pledged them to secrecy; it kept records of their service classified for a quarter of a century after the war had ended.

Their story is told in a new book, “Honor by Fire,” by Lyn Crost, 79, who was an Associated Press reporter in Washington when she was hired by the Honolulu Star-Bulletin to cover the feats of Hawaii’s soldiers in Europe.

There, she became acquainted with the Japanese-American soldiers and has maintained those friendships for 50 years.

Still, she had to work hard to get their adventures from men who, she writes, are “so modest that you must drag the stories out of them or hear the accounts from others.”

In the Pacific, the 6,000 Nisei--second-generation Japanese-Americans--”saved over 1 million lives and shortened the war by two years,” Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, intelligence chief for Gen. Douglas MacArthur, estimated in a speech years later.

All told, the Nisei linguists translated 20 million captured documents and questioned 14,000 prisoners, sometimes wresting surprising information.

Responding to humane treatment from his Japanese-American interrogator, one prisoner, a former shipyard worker, drew detailed sketches of every type of ship in Japan’s navy.

Being a war front translator could be dangerous work. For soldiers like Yoshikazu Yamada it could be doubly dangerous. He was treating American wounded when the Japanese attacked an airfield in the Philippines. As he fled, the Americans mistook him for the enemy. He found himself ducking fire from both sides.

Nisei linguists served with Allied forces from the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and China.

Many of them volunteered--and some were drafted--from the internment camps to which virtually all West Coast Japanese-Americans were confined by a nervous government following the outbreak of war on Dec. 7, 1941.

According to Willoughby, Japanese indifference about security allowed Nisei intelligence teams to read captured maps and orders, to learn Japanese troop strength and plans of attack and, from diaries and letters and poems, to learn the state of morale of Japanese troops.

“Other documents indicated the enemy’s problems of food and supply, his order of battle, the effect of our air attacks, his relations with the natives, the relative effectiveness of Allied and Japanese weapons,” Willoughby later reported. “Spot interrogations of prisoners taken in battle were at times of such importance that they caused a shift in Allied plans of attack.”

The Nisei served in the struggle to open the Burma Road to funnel weapons to China. In India, they intercepted Japanese radio commands for air strikes. And, by a stroke of luck, they were able to provide Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower with a description of Germany’s defenses that his troops would have to breach when they invaded Europe on D-Day.

That occurred because the Japanese ambassador to Berlin had been given an extensive tour of Germany’s defenses and promptly sent a description to Tokyo. His message was intercepted in Turkey and sent to Virginia, where Nisei linguists translated it. Word was then flashed to Eisenhower.

Despite their service, says Crost, the Japanese-Americans are still singed by prejudice.

“This story must be told,” she said. “Americans do not know how hard these men fought in a war to keep democracy alive.”